El Noviciado de Córdoba de la Provincia Jesuítica del Paraguay : Historia y recuperación arqueológica, 1607-1990

El libro trata la historia de los restos arqueológicos conocidos como la “Cripta Jesuítica del Noviciado Viejo”. Denominación poco afortunada a la vista de las revelaciones históricas que contiene el presente texto. Page aborda los diferentes sitios donde estuvo ubicado el Noviciado de la Provincia Jesuítica del Paraguay, haciendo hincapié en el proyectado por el maestro-arquitecto Johann Kraus, sobre la base de una casa donada por los hermanos jesuitas Ignacio y Francisco Mujica. También evoca los singulares destinos ulteriores que tuvo, donde funcionó la Casa de Ejercicios, Hospital de Bethlemitas… Incluye la vida de los primeros novicios y las no pocas penurias de los jóvenes exiliados en 1767. El tiempo, la memoria colectiva y la intervención del hombre, hicieron desaparecer el edificio del siglo XVIII. Después de mucho tiempo y como un hecho casual, parte del mismo fue redescubierto debajo de la avenida Colón, siendo oportunamente recuperado en 1990

“EN SUEÑOS VEO LOS CRÍMENES”: FEMINICIDIO, FICCIÓN Y AGENCIAMIENTO

Un desborde excesivo de violencia es lo que marca el imaginario cultural reciente alrededor de la figura del feminicidio. Un tipo de violencia sistemática y sostenida sobre los cuerpos feminizados pero también un hacer sobre los cuerpos, una técnica detallada y precisa en el acto de dar la muerte es lo que define un tipo de genocidio que se trama a partir de la vulnerabilidad y la exposición corporal selectiva. En las páginas siguientes vamos a considerar una serie textual que va desde Chicas Muertas (publicado en 2014) de la argentina Selva Almada hasta Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego de la argentina Mariana Enriquez (aparecido en 2016). Estas escenas puntuales quieren seguir o formular una serie posible en torno al eje del que parte: ¿que es lo que define esa deriva genocida -vinculada a los modos precisos de la violencia patriarcal y a la gestión de la muerte a través de la destrucción de los cuerpos- que habita en los procesos de precarización de la vida? DOI: https://doi.org/10.47295/mren.v8i1.188

Using Microbial Community Interactions within Plant Microbiomes to Advance an Evergreen Agricultural Revolution

Innovative plant breeding and technology transfer fostered the Green Revolution (GR), which transformed agriculture worldwide by increasing grain yields in developing countries. The GR temporarily alleviated world hunger, but also reduced biodiversity, nutrient cycling, and carbon (C) sequestration that agricultural lands can provide. Meanwhile, economic disparity and food insecurity within and among countries continues. Subsequent agricultural advances, focused on objectives such as increasing crop yields or reducing the risk of a specific pest, have failed to meet food demands at the local scale or to restore lost ecosystem services. An increasing human population, climate change, growing per capita food and energy demands, and reduced ecosystem potential to provide agriculturally relevant services have created an unrelenting need for improved crop production practices. Meeting this need in a sustainable fashion will require interdisciplinary approaches that integrate plant and microbial ecology with efforts to advance crop production while mitigating effects of a changing climate. Metagenomic advances are revealing microbial dynamics that can simultaneously improve crop production and soil restoration while enhancing crop resistance to environmental change. Restoring microbial diversity to contemporary agroecosystems could establish ecosystem services while reducing production costs for agricultural producers. Our framework for examining plant-microbial interactions at multiple scales, modeling outcomes to broadly explore potential impacts, and interacting with extension and training networks to transfer microbial based agricultural technologies across socioeconomic scales, offers an integrated strategy for advancing agroecosystem sustainability while minimizing potential for the kind of negative ecological and socioeconomic feedbacks that have resulted from many widely adopted agricultural technologies

Expansion of Agriculture in Northern Cold-Climate Regions: A Cross-Sectoral Perspective on Opportunities and Challenges

Agriculture in the boreal and Arctic regions is perceived as marginal, low intensity and inadequate to satisfy the needs of local communities, but another perspective is that northern agriculture has untapped potential to increase the local supply of food and even contribute to the global food system. Policies across northern jurisdictions target the expansion and intensification of agriculture, contextualized for the diverse social settings and market foci in the north. However, the rapid pace of climate change means that traditional methods of adapting cropping systems and developing infrastructure and regulations for this region cannot keep up with climate change impacts. Moreover, the anticipated conversion of northern cold-climate natural lands to agriculture risks a loss of up to 76% of the carbon stored in vegetation and soils, leading to further environmental impacts. The sustainable development of northern agriculture requires local solutions supported by locally relevant policies. There is an obvious need for the rapid development of a transdisciplinary, cross-jurisdictional, long-term knowledge development, and dissemination program to best serve food needs and an agricultural economy in the boreal and Arctic regions while minimizing the risks to global climate, northern ecosystems and communities

Review of the cultivation program within the National Alliance for Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts

The cultivation efforts within the National Alliance for Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts (NAABB)were developed to provide four major goals for the consortium, which included biomass production for downstream experimentation, development of new assessment tools for cultivation, development of new cultivation reactor technologies, and development of methods for robust cultivation. The NAABB consortium test beds produced over 1500 kg of biomass for downstream processing. The biomass production included a number of model production strains, but also took into production some of the more promising strains found through the prospecting efforts of the consortium. Cultivation efforts at large scale are intensive and costly, therefore the consortium developed tools and models to assess the productivity of strains under various environmental conditions, at lab scale, and validated these against scaled outdoor production systems. Two new pond-based bioreactor designs were tested for their ability to minimize energy consumption while maintaining, and even exceeding, the productivity of algae cultivation compared to traditional systems. Also, molecular markers were developed for quality control and to facilitate detection of bacterial communities associated with cultivated algal species, including the Chlorella spp. pathogen, Vampirovibrio chlorellavorus,which was identified in at least two test site locations in Arizona and New Mexico. Finally, the consortium worked on understanding methods to utilize compromised municipal waste water streams for cultivation. This review provides an overview of the cultivation methods and tools developed by the NAABB consortium to produce algae biomass, in robust low energy systems, for biofuel production

Survival of Escherichia coli in the environment: fundamental and public health aspects

In this review, our current understanding of the species Escherichia coli and its persistence in the open environment is examined. E. coli consists of six different subgroups, which are separable by genomic analyses. Strains within each subgroup occupy various ecological niches, and can be broadly characterized by either commensalistic or different pathogenic behaviour. In relevant cases, genomic islands can be pinpointed that underpin the behaviour. Thus, genomic islands of, on the one hand, broad environmental significance, and, on the other hand, virulence, are highlighted in the context of E. coli survival in its niches. A focus is further placed on experimental studies on the survival of the different types of E. coli in soil, manure and water. Overall, the data suggest that E. coli can persist, for varying periods of time, in such terrestrial and aquatic habitats. In particular, the considerable persistence of the pathogenic E. coli O157:H7 is of importance, as its acid tolerance may be expected to confer a fitness asset in the more acidic environments. In this context, the extent to which E. coli interacts with its human/animal host and the organism's survivability in natural environments are compared. In addition, the effect of the diversity and community structure of the indigenous microbiota on the fate of invading E. coli populations in the open environment is discussed. Such a relationship is of importance to our knowledge of both public and environmental health. The ISME Journal (2011) 5, 173-183; doi:10.1038/ismej.2010.80; published online 24 June 2010NATO [ESP.EAP.CLG 981785]; The Soil Biotechnology Foundationinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Prevalence and correlates of smoking among urban adult men in Bangladesh: slum versus non-slum comparison

Khan MH, Khan A, Krämer A, Mori M. Prevalence and correlates of smoking among urban adult men in Bangladesh: slum versus non-slum comparison. BMC Public Health. 2009;9(1):149.Background: Smoking is one of the leading causes of premature death particularly in developing countries. The prevalence of smoking is high among the general male population in Bangladesh. Unfortunately smoking information including correlates of smoking in the cities especially in the urban slums is very scarce, although urbanization is rapid in Bangladesh and slums are growing quickly in its major cities. Therefore this study reported prevalences of cigarette and bidi smoking and their correlates separately by urban slums and non-slums in Bangladesh. Methods: We used secondary data which was collected by the 2006 Urban Health Survey. The data were representative for the urban areas in Bangladesh. Both slums and non-slums located in the six City Corporations were considered. Slums in the cities were identified by two steps, first by using the satellite images and secondly by ground truthing. At the next stage, several clusters of households were selected by using proportional sampling. Then from each of the selected clusters, about 25 households were randomly selected. Information of a total of 12,155 adult men, aged 15 59 years, was analyzed by stratifying them into slum (= 6,488) and non-slum (= 5,667) groups. Simple frequency, bivariable and multivariable logistic regression analyses were performed using SPSS. Results: Overall smoking prevalence for the total sample was 53.6% with significantly higher prevalences among men in slums (59.8%) than non-slums (46.4%). Respondents living in slums reported a significantly (P < 0.001) higher prevalence of smoking cigarettes (53.3%) as compared to those living in non-slums (44.6%). A similar pattern was found for bidis (slums = 11.4% and non-slums = 3.2%, P < 0.001). Multivariable logistic regression revealed significantly higher odds ratio (OR) of smoking cigarettes (OR = 1.12, 95% CI = 1.03-1.22), bidis (OR = 1.90, 95% CI = 1.58-2.29) and any of the two (OR = 1.23, 95% CI = 1.13-1.34) among men living in slums as compared to those living in non-slums when controlled for age, division, education, marital status, religion, birth place and types of work. Division, education and types of work were the common significant correlates for both cigarette and bidi smoking in slums and non-slums by multivariable logistic regressions. Other significant correlates of smoking cigarettes were marital status (both areas), birth place (slums), and religion (non-slums). Similarly significant factors for smoking bidis were age (both areas), marital status (slums), religion (non-slums), and birth place (both areas). Conclusion: The men living in the urban slums reported higher rates of smoking cigarettes and bidis as compared to men living in the urban non-slums. Some of the significant correlates of smoking e. g. education and division should be considered for prevention activities. Our findings clearly underscore the necessity of interventions and preventions by policy makers, public health experts and other stakeholders in slums because smoking was more prevalent in the slum communities with detrimental health sequelae

Role of miR-2392 in driving SARS-CoV-2 infection

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNAs involved in post-transcriptional gene regulation that have a major impact on many diseases and provide an exciting avenue toward antiviral therapeutics. From patient transcriptomic data, we determined that a circulating miRNA, miR-2392, is directly involved with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) machinery during host infection. Specifically, we show that miR-2392 is key in driving downstream suppression of mitochondrial gene expression, increasing inflammation, glycolysis, and hypoxia, as well as promoting many symptoms associated with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infection. We demonstrate that miR-2392 is present in the blood and urine of patients positive for COVID-19 but is not present in patients negative for COVID-19. These findings indicate the potential for developing a minimally invasive COVID-19 detection method. Lastly, using in vitro human and in vivo hamster models, we design a miRNA-based antiviral therapeutic that targets miR-2392, significantly reduces SARS-CoV-2 viability in hamsters, and may potentially inhibit a COVID-19 disease state in humans